73.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.101–103. Thucydidesreferstothe ancestors of the rebels as having been “enslaved”: οἱ τω̑ν παλαιω̑ν Μεσσηνίων τότε δουλωθέντων ἀπόγονοι. See Nino Luraghi, “Becoming Messenian”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 122 (2002), 45–69.
74.
One recent textbook misleadlingly reports the incident thus: “A helot revolt did indeed break out in Messenia in 464 BC, after a severe earthquake and it took the Spartans almost four years – and a great deal of effort – to suppress it” (Lukas de Blois and R. J. van der Spek, An Introduction to the Ancient World [London: Routledge, 1997], 99).
75.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.627b
76.
Thucydides observes that the Spartans had not been quick to go to war before and were restricted by wars of their own, presumably referring to that against the helots (History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.118.2). The issue of the status of helots is discussed in Chapter 7.
77.
Ibid., 4.36.
78.
Ibid., 4.3.3.
79.
Ibid., 4.3.8.
80.
Ibid., 4.8.2.
81.
Ibid., 4.36. Thucydides even goes as far as to say the struggle would have continued indefinitely had the Messenians not stepped forward to help.
82.
Τω̑ν τε Εἱλώτων αὐτομολούντων καί φοβούμενοι μὴ καὶ ἐπὶ μακρότερον σφίσι τι νεωτερισθη̣̑ τω̑ν κατὰ τὴν χώραν (ibid., 4.41).
83.
αἰεὶ γὰρ τὰ πολλὰ Λακεδαιμονίοις πρὸν τοὺν Εἵλωτας τη̑ς φυλακη̑ς πέρι μάλιστα κατειστήκει (ibid., 4.80).
84.
Xenophon, Hellenica, 3.3.5–7.
85.
Αὐτοὶ μέντοι πα̑σιν ἔφασαν συνειδέναι καὶ εἵλωσι καὶ νεοδαμώδεσι καὶ τοι̑ς ὑπομείοσι καὶ τοι̑ς περιοίκοις (ibid., 3.3.6).
86.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 14.657c–d.
87.
Ὅπου γὰρ ἐν τούτοις τις λόγος γένοιτο περὶ Σπαρτιατω̑ν οὐδένα δύνασθαι κρύπτειν τὸ μὴ οὐχ ἡδεως ά̇ν καὶ ὠμω̑ν ἐσθίειν αὐτω̑ν (Xenophon, Hellenica, 3.3.6).
88.
Ibid., 6.5.24.
89.
Ibid., 6.5.25.
90.
Ibid., 6.5.28. In response to this proclamation, about 6,000 helots came forward, which at first alarmed the Spartans, but once other allies arrived, reducing the proportion of helots to the total force to a more acceptable size, the Spartans were less fearful.
91.
The establishment of Messene was an event that was, Cawkwell remarks, “the most important achievement of the campaign” (Xenophon, A History of My Times, Rex Warner [trans.], George Cawkwell [intro. and notes] [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979], 351, note on ch. 6.5.52).
92.
Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 28.7. Another Athenian source, Isocrates, from the fifth/fourth century BCE, describes the lot of the helots thus: “Right from the start these men have suffered severely, and in the present situation they have served Sparta well; yet the Spartan ephors are allowed to execute without trial as many of them as they wish. As far as the rest of the Greeks are concerned it is not holy to pollute oneself by killing even the most useless of one’s household slaves” (Panathenaicus, 181).
93.
Sometimes they resorted to mass desertion, as illustrated by the Athenian slaves in the Peloponnesian War in 413 BCE, but the present discussion is concerned with armed revolt.
3. Maintaining resistance
1.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 8.40. Thucydides mentions slaves in Chios at this point late in the Peloponnesian War because he goes on to say that they did great damage to their owners because many of them deserted and, going over to the Athenians, provided the enemy with very useful information.
2.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.264c.
3.
Ibid., 6.265b.
4.
In connection with the debate about maroon communities later, it is perhaps worth noting that Athenaeus describes the episode as a war (ἐξεπολεμήθησαν διὰ δούλους) (ibid., 6.265c). All in all, Athenaeus’ character, Democritus, gives a very sympathetic picture of slaves.
5.
μικρὸν δὲ πρὸ ἡμω̑ν (ibid., 6.265d).
6.
καὶ αὐτω̣̑̑ έ̇τι καὶ νυ̑v οἱ δραπέται ἀποφέρουσιν ἀπαρχὰς πάντων ὡ̂ν ἂν ὑφέλωνται (ibid., 6.266d).
7.
Alexander Fuks, “Slave War and Slave Troubles in Chios in the Third Century BC”, Athenaeum 46 (1968), 102–11.
8.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.266d.
9.
Ibid., 13.588f–589a. Nymphodorus is included in A. Giannini’s Paradoxographorum Graecorum Reliquiae (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1966), 112–15, and Antonius Westermann’s collection of paradoxographical writers, ΠΑΡΑΔΟΞΟΓΡΑΦΟΙ: Scriptores Rerum Mirabilium Graeci (London, 1839), 177–8. It is interesting to note, since Diodorus is another important source on slaves, that P. J. Stylianou, A Historical Commentary on Diodorus Siculus, Book 15 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4–5, comments on Diodorus’ predilection for the sensational, using paradoxographers as sources for his history.
10.
Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery, does not put the Drimakos episode in his chapters on “Resistance” or “Rebellion” but in “Status Symbol or Economic Investment?”. Shaw, Spartacus and the Slave Wars, includes Drimakos along with runaways in a chapter entitled “Fugitive Slaves and Maroon Communities”. Bradley gives the definition of these communities: “communities of fugitives and slaves in revolt organised in hideouts on a paramilitary basis as a way of creating an alternative life to the one previously spent in slavery” (Slavery and Rebellion, 4).
11.
It was thought that it was a derivation from the Spanish “cimarrón”, which means “wild” or “untamed” but, as Richard Price remarks in the new introduction to his Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1979] 1996), xii, it has been argued that it in fact derives from an Amerindian root.
12.
Price, “Maroons and their Communities”, 608. Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 110, describes one such community in San Basilio in Colombia that survived and enabled its inhabitants to live autonomously for nearly 200 years, from 1599 to 1790. For a very useful survey of the literature in recent years on this subject, see Price, Maroon Societies, new introduction, 1–32.
13.
See Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 99–104, for some of these punishments in Spanish America. Price summarizes: “similar punishments for marronage – from castration to being slowly roasted to death – are reported from many different regions” (“Maroons and their Communities”, 609).
14.
Ibid.
15.
Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World 140 BC–70 BC, 1–17. This is connected with his differentiation of the ancient slave uprisings from revolution: “Indeed, with account duly taken of the cleavage that must be interposed between rebellion and revolution” (ibid., 15).
16.
Ibid., emphasis added.
17.
Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 81, emphasis added.
18.
κατέσφαξαν ὀγδοήκοντα ό̇ντεν, καὶ ὅτι πλη̑θος ἀγείρουσι (Diodorus, 36.4).
19.
&n
bsp; Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 99, emphasis added.
20.
Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, 40, emphasis added. Bradley has something very similar in the last paragraph of his book:
But without an erosion in society at large of the concept of the necessity and immanence of slavery, indeed of the naturalness of slavery – without, that is, the emergence of the kind of egalitarian ideals that led to abolitionism in the modern world but that were conceptually unknown in antiquity – resistance on a massive, violent scale could not bring about any amelioration of the lives of those slavery oppressed.
(Slavery and Rebellion, 126)
Earlier he had said more categorically: “What can be termed a maroon dimension to their resistance is indeed detectable in the historical record, and once exposed, it confirms the absence of any ideological theory or impulse behind the slave movements” (ibid., 104, emphasis added). See also Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, 73–82.
21.
Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 103, emphasis added.
22.
Schwartz, “Resistance and Accommodation in Eighteenth-century Brazil”, 631–2 (appendix 2) reproduces the document.
23.
Ibid., 629.
24.
Ibid., 632.
25.
Appian, Civil Wars, 1.120.
26.
Laurent Dubois, The Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1938] 2001), 73. See also Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 137–48, on the shifting alliances of this period.
27.
Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants and Rebels, 125.
28.
Cicero, Letters to Friends, 15.4.10. Strabo may be describing something similar, when he writes:
Near the mountain ridges of the Taurus lies the piratical stronghold of Zenicetus – I mean Olympus (τὸ Ζηνικέτου πειρατήριόν ἐστιν ὁ Ὄλυμπος), both mountain and fortress, whence are visible all Lycia and Pamphilia and Pisidia and Milyas; but when the mountain was captured by Isauricus Zenicetus burnt himself up with his whole house. To him belonged also Corycus and Phaselis and many places in Pamphilia: but all were taken by Isauricus. (Strabo, Geography, 14.5.7)
Publicus Servilius Isauricus was praetor in 54 BCE, and consul with Julius Caesar in 48 BCE. He wrote to Cicero while governor of Asia in 46 BCE.
29.
Louis Robert and Jeanne Robert, Claros I: Décrets Hellénististiques (Paris: Editions de Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1989), 13, line 37. See also Christian Mileta, “Eumenes III und die Sklaven: Neue Ueberlegungen zum Charakter des Aristonikusaufstandes” Klio 80 (1998), 47–65, esp. 54–5. Robert and Robert, Claros I, date the inscription to the time of Aristonicus, although Jean-Louis Ferrary, “Le statut des cités libres dans l’empire romain à la lumière des inscriptions de Claros”, CRAI (1991), 557–77, thinks it could be later than this. This inscription will be discussed in Chapter 4.
30.
This expression is reminiscent of a quotation from Anaxandrides in Athenaeus: “Slaves my good sir, have no citizenship anywhere, yet Fortune shifts their bodies in all kinds of ways” [Οὐκ έ̇στι δούλων, ὠ̑γάθ’, οὐδαμου̑ πόλις, / τύχη δὲ πάντη̣ μεταφέρει τὰ σώματα] (Deipnosophistae, 6.263b–c).
31.
Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 6–7.
32.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.272f.
33.
Florus, Epitome of Roman History, 2.7.1. In the following chapter Florus describes the war explicitly as a disgrace: “Enimero et servilium armorum dedecus feras” (ibid., 2.8.1).
34.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.265c.
35.
Ibid.
36.
However, the editors carry on: “But then few would claim even to have read him” (David Braund and John Wilkins [eds], Athenaeus and his World [Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000]), 1.
37.
Frank Walbank observes that Athenaeus sometimes depicts Rome and Romans in an unfavourable light (“Athenaeus and Polybius”, in Athenaeus and his World, 161–9, esp. 168).
38.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.101.
39.
Compare this to the early moments of the Spartacan rebellion and their use of such weapons (Plutarch, Life of Crassus, 8–9).
40.
Diodorus, 34/35.2.17.
41.
Livy, Summaries, 56.
42.
Orosius, History Against the Pagans, 5.6.6.
43.
It seems to me that accurate numbers are irrecoverable now. But even today different estimates of large numbers are often not at all similar. What concerns me with the revolts from antiquity is the perception by the authorities of the numbers involved. In the case of demonstrations in the twenty-first century, police estimates are always very much lower than those of the organizers of the event.
44.
Diodorus, 34/35.2.18.
45.
It was the successful siege of Enna and Tauromenium by the Romans that ended the slave war.
46.
Diodorus, 34/35.2.46.
47.
ὀνειδίζοντεν αὐτω̑ν τὴν ὑπερηφανίαν καὶ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τη̑ν εἰς τὸν ό̇λεθρον προαγούσην ὕβρεως (ibid.)
48.
Liv Mariah Yarrow, Historiography at the End of the Republic: Provincial Perspectives on Roman Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 336–41, suggests that Diodorus does not present a sympathetic picture of the slaves as much as a critical one of the free-born poor. Her conclusion, while perhaps having some relation to the narratives of the other historians she discusses, is not an accurate representation of the picture drawn by Diodorus: “Yet when we hear of the horrors committed during the slave revolts and the gruesome nature of a certain culture, it is hard not to see in the historians more basic message: it could be worse than the Romans.… Rome can offer stability if those in the provinces are willing to cooperate” (ibid., 340–41).
49.
“In hoc autem servilis tumultus excitatio quanto rarior ceteris tanto truculentior est, quia intentione commovetur libera multitudo ut patriam augeat, servilis ut perdat” (Orosius, History Against the Pagans, 5.6.6).
50.
Benjamin Farrington, Diodorus Siculus: Universal Historian (Swansea: University of Wales, Swansea, 1937), 24.
51.
Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion, 125, emphasis added.
52.
Gerald Verbrugghe, “Sicily 210–70 BC: Livy, Cicero and Diodorus”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 103 (1972), 535–59; “The ‘Elogium’ from Polla and the First Slave War”, Classical Philology 68 (1973), 25–35; “Slave Rebellion or Sicily in Revolt?”, Kokalos 20 (1974), 46–60.
53.
Verbrugghe, “Sicily 210–70 BC”.
54.
Ibid., 540–5.
55.
Diodorus, 34/35.2.3.
56.
Verbrugghe, “Slave Rebellion or Sicily in Revolt?”, 49–50.
57.
Bradley discusses this, writing: “Admittedly, the fact that Eunus minted coins could be urged as evidence of an aspiration on his part toward a highly formalised monarchy” (Slavery and Rebellion, 120). He goes on to admit that Demeter “had been used earlier in Sicilian history for political and even anti-Roman purposes”. Even so, he argues, “it would be illogical to assume at once that a rebellion of slaves was now a rising against Rome rule” (ibid.). Instead, he urges the reader to think that the representations of natural products on the coins reflected the slaves’ wish to have enough to eat.
58
.
Livy, Summaries, 56, 58–9.
59.
Livy, Summaries, 56. The threat was clearly a great one, and the suggestion by Otto Rossbach (ed.), T. Livi periochae omnium librorum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910) for changing “saepe” (often) to “saeve” (fiercely) in the last sentence, because otherwise it is rather flat, on the contrary makes it less significant. It would only be expected for slaves to fight saeve, but surely less so for them to fight saepe. See Livy, History of Rome, Volume XIV: Summaries, Fragments, Julius Obsequens, Julius Obsequens, A. C. Schlesinger (trans.), index by Russel M. Geer (Loeb Classical Library) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 59, n.7.
60.
Strabo, Geography, 14.1.38. This is discussed at greater length in Chapter 4.
61.
Mileta, “Eumenes III und die Sklaven”. The mention of the city of slaves appears among the problems facing the city for which the man honoured by the inscription, Polemaios, had help from the Romans. στοιχου̑σαν δὲ τη̑ι περὶ αὐτον ὑποστάσει λαβὼν καὶ τὴν παρὰ τη̑ς συγκλήτου μαρτυρίαν, γινομένης ἁρπαγη̑ς καὶ ἐφόδου μεθ’ὅπλων καὶ ἀδικήμάτων ἐπὶ τ(η̑)ς ὑπαρχούσ(η)ς (ἡ)μει̑ν χώρας ἐπὶ Δούλων πολέως (Robert & Robert, Claros I, 13, col. 2, line 37; discussion, 36–8). Ferrary, “Le statut des cités libres”, suggests that this decree dates to a slightly later period, but this does not affect the argument here. That these rebels survived in the area some time after the fall of Aristonicus is a perfectly reasonable suggestion.
62.
See Farrington, Diodorus Siculus, 25–35, for a discussion of this episode.
63.
Slave Revolts in Antiquity Page 18